Since
the end of the cold war, the U.S. had been looking for an enemy to match the
Soviet Union and came up empty handed until 9/11.

Refocusing the efforts of the
world's largest and most expensive military empire on Al Qaeda would provide
the incentive for a massive re-armament, just the way the Soviet "invasion" of
Afghanistan had done two decades before. According to a Washington
Post report within nine years of America's invasion of Afghanistan, hunting
Al Qaeda had become the raison d'être of the American national security
bureaucracy employing 854,000 military personnel, civil servants and private
contractors with more than 263 organizations transformed or created including
the Office of Homeland Security.

The
sheer scope of the growth and the extensive privatization of intelligence and security
was so profound that it represented "an alternative geography of the United
States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight."

- Advertisement -

But
the report admitted that after nine years of unprecedented spending and
growth, the labyrinth of secret bureaucracy put in place after 9/11 was
so massive and convoluted that its ability to perform its stated
function to keep America safe was impossible to determine. Even worse,
it was becoming clear that the bureaucratic monster had taken on a life
of its own with the U.S. lost in a maze of its own creation, trapped in
an expanding web of spies and counter spies that far surpassed the worst
paranoia of its old nemesis, the Soviet Union.

The logic train of the
war on terror and its fundamental rooting in Afghanistan had finally
become clear. The perpetual Taliban/Al Qaeda threat fueled a perpetual
war that could never be won, justifying an endless string of
restrictions on civil liberties and governmental transparency, which
then prevented Americans from seeing how their money was spent. Locked
out of this "alternative geography of the United States," Americans have
become helpless to stop their democracy and their economy from being
lifted right out from under them.

Thanks to the revelations the word was finally out that whatever impact the "war on terror" had made on terror worldwide ( which many claimed it made only worse) it was above all, a spectacular boondoggle.

- Advertisement -

The
shocking, Sunday July 25, WikiLeaks release of 92,000 documents by the
New York Times Der Spiegel and The Guardian, was the acid test for
Washington's beltway experts to square themselves with the fatal
collapse confronting them and who was to blame for it. According to the New York Times, "Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks."

The
documents also revealed numerous embarrassing specifics that had either
been downplayed or avoided entirely by the U.S. military in the 9 year
old war including: that the Taliban have used portable heat-seeking
missiles against NATO aircraft; that the U.S. employs secret commando
units to "capture/kill" insurgent commanders that have claimed notable
successes but have at times also gone terribly wrong by killing
civilians and stoking Afghan resentment; that the military's success
with its Predator drones has been highly over-dramatized. Some crash or collide
forcing Americans to undertake risky retrieval missions before the
Taliban could claim the drone's weaponry.

In addition, the reports
reveal that retired ISI chief, Lt. General Hamid Gul, "has worked
tirelessly to reactivate old networks, employing familiar allies like
Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands
of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan"
If anything was a guide to who'd been drinking the Washington K Street
Kool-Aid, it could be measured by the degree of acceptance to the new
information. According to the Boston Globe, Congressman James McGovern, a
Worcester Mass. Democrat maintained, " that the documents show a far grimmer situation than members of Congress have been told about in classified briefings,.."

Mass.
Senator John Kerry initially declared that the documents raised
"serious questions," about policy. But under pressure from the White
House, by Monday, Kerry was echoing the official line, defending Obama
administration policy while insisting there was little new in the
documents. The reasons for Kerry's second thoughts were obvious. Matt
Viser of the Boston Globe writes, "Kerry has what is seen as a special
relationship with Pakistan; he has welcomed the country's army chief to
his house for dinner and accepted flowers from the country's president.
"There's no question that Senator Kerry was instrumental in leading the
initiative to triple our economic assistance to Pakistan,' said Molly
Kinder, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development,
which tracks US aid to Pakistan."

Had the documents amassed an equal amount of evidence that Iran or
Syria were working with Al Qaeda to carry out attacks on American troops
in Afghanistan, the bombers would have been warming up on the flight
decks by sundown. But when it came to Pakistan, there was only
restraint. To the beltway insiders the actual revelations disclosed by
the leaked documents were less important than the exposure of systemic
failure they represented. The disclosures had taken the floor out from
under the assumptions of the war on terror imposed following 9/11. But
to the beltway it was business as usual and reality had little if
anything to do with it.

- Advertisement -

Little
wonder that the world's population had lost faith in the American
enterprise in Afghanistan. Even the Afghan people themselves had come to
believe the United States wasn't really there to fight the Taliban, but
pretended to fight as an excuse for remaining in the region. The
WikiLeaks reports are the raw data from American troops fighting in the
field. But the reaction from official Washington was as if the U.S. had
come to be ruled by a city of isolated mandarins from another planet,
completely detached from the world they governed and dismissive of any
efforts to bring them down to earth.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice,a novel.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband (more...)